Here’s an interesting article in the Washington Post by Kent Babb about the NFL Dallas Cowboys’ team fixer, a big black ex-cop and ex-bail bondsman who is on friendly terms with everybody who works at the courthouse in Dallas. He gets paid by the Cowboys to make drunk driving and domestic violence arrests of Cowboy football players disappear before they get into the newspapers.
He is, like the “Pulp Fiction” character Winston Wolf [played by Harvey Keitel], a fixer who exists on the margins and functions without ceremony. He considers the angles, contemplates the ifs, solves the most complicated problems. No wonder the Cowboys, known for acquiring players on their second or third chances, have come to trust Wells implicitly with their most valuable and unpredictable assets. Whatever route a player is trying to find through the system — from simple help with a driver’s license to thorny entanglements involving criminal charges — there’s always one more option to help find a way: Call in the Wolf.
“I haven’t had a question that Dave couldn’t answer, I can tell you that,” said Adam “Pacman” Jones, the Bengals cornerback.
“Whenever something is messed up and you need to go outside the lines a little bit,” former Kaufman County, Tex., district attorney Rick Harrison said, “he’s your guy.”
“A tremendous asset to the franchise,” Jerry Jones said. “. . . I won’t get into detail of the kinds of things [Wells does], because he does everything.” …
Said longtime attorney Anthony Lyons: “There are going to be times that David comes up with a result that you’re just not going to ask him about.” …
Almost nothing is as valuable to an NFL front office as discretion, nothing as threatening to a season or brand as a “distraction.” Forbes says the Cowboys are worth $4.2 billion, a value that in part depends on the team’s ability to keep star players on the field, contend for championships and maintain its global popularity. For every incident that generates a negative headline, Wells said, 10 are handled without the public’s knowledge.
Considering how many scandals involving football players wind up in the press, the notion that another order of magnitude incidents actually happen is, well, eye-opening.
COMMENTS:
* There are two current examples of fixers in Showtime shows. Ray Donovan, and Billions.
I’m not sure this means there’s another order of magnitude of incidents though. Dallas has long had a particularly trashy team in contrast with, say, the New York Giants. The Giants have generally had a low tolerance for off-the-field nonsense, quickly cutting players that embarrass them. Whether that’s due to the character of the owners or the higher visibility of being in a media capital, I don’t know.
* I would venture that Mr. Wolf acts mainly as a conduit through which sufficient hush money is funneled to the potential plaintiffs (and others) to make them “forget” the incident.
* Sad anthropological observation: this guy is basically a substitute dad.
* There is a female free agent fixer who works for NFL players. It sounds like she has a good gig going, and stays very busy.
Then there are the jobs that she hates like poison but have become a staple of her practice: the late-night distress calls from players. “I had a very well-known star, one of the nicest you’ll ever meet, get jammed up in a strip club at 2 AM.” A dancer there took him to a bathroom in back, promising a blow job on the house. “He thinks he’s getting serviced, but she has a change of heart, so he says, ‘No worries,’ and goes back out to watch her dance,” White says, conceding that this was the player’s version and that she never got to hear the dancer’s side. “Later that night he gets a call from the cops: She claims she was sexually assaulted by him.”
This happened 12 years ago and served as White’s window into the netherworld of hustlers gaming athletes. “You find them in every town with at least one major sports team: women at crappy strip joints and hotel bars, or loudmouths trying to start trouble in clubs, hoping my guy hits them so they can sue. I had a recent case where the player showed restraint, but then someone in his party hit the guy. Well, the person goes out and gets an attorney, saying he’s now disabled for life. But he didn’t sue the friend, of course: He sued the player, and will probably get a check when it’s all done.”
In the strip-joint matter, no charge was ever filed; the police and the district attorney deemed the charges baseless. But word leaked to the local media that something had happened, and the player’s reputation hung by a thread when White called all the outlets in town. “I said, ‘There’s nothing to this story, but it’ll hurt him if it airs; run it, and he’ll never speak to you again.’ ” Every outlet fell in line except for one local affiliate, which floated a mention of the claim. No rivals took the bait, though, and the story drifted away, never casting shade on the player. Meanwhile, the stripper hired a bottom-feeding lawyer: His office was one door down from where she danced. “We ended up paying her a little to stay out of court, but it never made the papers or happened again” to her client. In the end he bought himself a dear lesson cheaply: “Nothing good can happen in a nightclub or strip joint after midnight – nothing,” says White, who bemoans the time and labor she’s wasted tamping down those 2 AM eruptions.
She won’t say how many claims she’s paid out or even ballpark the size of the checks players have written – “I’m not giving those girls one drop of extra incentive,” she sniffs – but over time it has become a steady sideline operation.
Whether guiding her clients through paternity dramas – “First rule: Always take the swab-kit test; 60 percent of the time the kid is someone else’s” – or walking them through the minefield of jilted girlfriends who threaten to go public with charges, White spends many mornings armed for battle, going from skirmish to skirmish. “She’s the world’s most expensive babysitter, because some dudes keep repeating childish things,” says Salaam. “And trust me when I tell you, she steps to them strong, but there’s that handful of guys who don’t hear it first time out. Or the third or fourth time, either.”
* It is often asserted that the justice system is unfair to blacks — that their conviction rate reflects more than their offending rate. However, there reasons why the opposite may be true:
(1) The fraction of murders cleared in black areas is lower, since blacks are less likely to report crimes to the police. (I think this is true — can someone supply supporting evidence?)
(2) Some blacks who are good at sports at the college and pro level have fixers.
In many schools there is pressure to equalize discipline rates by race, which leads to under-punishing of black delinquents.
They are both light-skinned blacks and both certain to win as they are in safe democratic seats and already won their primaries.
* Seems like it was just yesterday when Pacman Jones was “being rebellion” and beating up women at “scrip” clubs. (LINK) (LINK)
“A tremendous asset to the franchise,” Jerry Jones said. “. . . I won’t get into detail of the kinds of things [Wells does], because he does everything.” …
Jerry is not going to be around forever folks; treasure him while he is still here.
* Cris Carter’s advice was to have a fall guy in the crew who would take the blame and be arrested in lieu of the NFL player.
* I would imagine that NFL players talk their way out of drunk driving arrests a lot.
My cousin who had been merely a minor league baseball player, but was a big charismatic guy, talked his way out of a lot of tickets when we shared an apartment.
* “Hush” money, especially for savagery associated with sexual assaults, spousal abuse, drunk driving, wild parties, drug use, doping. But who gets the “hush” money to motivate people (including the media and authorities) to look the other way? The victims, victim’s relatives, media reporters, cops on the beat, the friendly sergeant at the station house? Money talks. I’m reminded of how easily JFK over his life avoided publicity about his sexual misadventures and how easily Michael Jackson was able to avoid being charged with pedophilia.
We’re acquainted with a “fixer” in our local community … although her specialty is “damage control” over industrial accidents and deaths to avoid negative publicity for clients ranging from local businesses to major corporations. It’s fascinating to hear her talk about it.
We occasionally meet for lunch. She gives us the rundown on the latest industrial accidents and deaths in the community. Yes, we’re always surprised; one in ten appears in the media! She brings together victims (if they survive), victim’s relatives, insurance companies, management, cleanup crews. She is responsible for drafting statements to the media when necessary. Her objective is to get things back to normal with as little damage as quickly as possible. She is very good at it.
The strangest thing is that our friend is always busy. Sometimes our lunches are short. She has to get back to the scene. The bottom line is that “fixing” works.
* Every NFL team has this sort of (usually) black guy on the payroll. His job is to deal with the players’ chaotic personal lives, whether crazy girlfriends or wives, crazy mothers, run-ins, child-support, you name it. I don’t think he’s so much a surrogate father as a buffer to permit coaches and general managers to have some level of plausible deniability when dealing with the (rare) press coverage of how truly degenerate most of their players are. Probably a lot of the big college programs also have this sort of consigliere type figure.
Here’s a report of one of them in action last year.
And here’s the link to the fixer’s responsibilities.
* For all of Jerry Jones reclamation projects, the Cowboys have won how many Superbowls since he canned Jimmy Johnson? The Giants won two under authoritarian Tom Coughlin, sorely missed. The Patriots under Bill Belichick have skated the edge in coaching but ruthlessly discard players who create problems (Hernandez) and even those who bump up against the salary cap.
The problem with guys like Jones is that their indiscipline off the field infects them on the field, negating raw athletic talent. The Patriots tend to get guys with only one athletic talent, devise schemes where that’s all they do — maximize that one particular talent, and make it clear any screw ups and they will be replaced instantly with just another guy with that same talent.
Just as a guess, I’d bet that the Cowboys are among the worst along with the Seahawks and a few others, the Patriots the least bad (I would not say “best”) and many other teams somewhere in between.
